The Birthlight Trust is an educational charity set up in Cambridge in 2000 by Françoise Barbira Freedman. It’s mission statement is: ‘ to promote the physical and mental wellbeing during pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood of women, babies and fathers in the United Kingdom and the rest of the world through education and research’. Birthlight has developed a network of mothers, health professionals and researchers who share the view that much can be done in the community through simple means to promote greater wellbeing around childbirth.
In the last 15 years, Birthlight has excelled in aqua yoga, perinatal yoga, well-woman yoga therapy, infant aquatics and baby yoga. Birthlight has a reputation for an effective, high quality approach to birth and parenting education combined with a rigorous scientifically based approach. This reputation places Birthlight at the forefront in the development of the professional standardisation of procedures, increasingly required nationally and internationally.
Françoise Barbira Freedman, the founder of Birthlight, learnt her mothering skills from Amazonian rainforest people over long periods of anthropological fieldwork. She found empirically at first and increasingly through research that western babies and their parents could benefit greatly from this gentler yet rougher style of parenting both before and after birth. Breathing awareness, movement and rhythm, touch and sound have been integrated in simple practices accessible to all parents, whatever their backgrounds and culture. Yoga and swimming, which have been Françoise’s life long favoured exercises, have provided suitable cultural idioms in which to mould Birthlight applications. Parents in the world’s first nations are still a main inspiration and one of Birthlight’s aims is to enable them to adapt their cultures on their own terms in today’s world.
The trading arm of the Birthlight Trust, Birthlight Teaching Ltd, is active in training certified instructors who work with new families in the community and also in hospitals and health centres. There are currently over 1,000 Birthlight teachers in the UK alone; 35% work in the National Health Service and in Sure Start facilities. Birthlight actively promotes integrated care from the community, offering continuity of services from pre-conception to babies’ third year.
The diagram below summarises the key concepts on which Birthlight is built.
